


a(lethe)ia

by thingswithteeth



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: F/F, Female Orpheus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Friendship, Inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), M/M, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:28:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22081825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithteeth/pseuds/thingswithteeth
Summary: Kady descends into the Underworld to retrieve a lover.Notherlover.
Relationships: Kady Orloff-Diaz/Julia Wicker, Quentin Coldwater & Kady Orloff-Diaz, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh (background), William "Penny" Adiyodi/Julia Wicker, William "Penny" Adiyodi/Kady Orloff-Diaz (past)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 84





	1. Chapter 1

> Of him, along whose veins, where flows no blood at all,  
>  For ever the slow waters of green Lethe crawl.

— Charles Baudelaire, _Fleurs du mal_ (tran. Edna St. Vincent Millay)

“Drink.”

A hand against the back of his head, fingers tangled bone-hard strong and unyielding in his hair, forcing his face down into the water, until drowning seems more likely than drinking.

“C’mon, I didn’t go through all this for nothing. _Drink_.”

_Memory_.

His?

The tips of his fingers, pressed together, are slicked dark with polish. Electricity buzzes in his ears, makes his hair stand on end, makes him wish—.

_—should have taken the earrings off. Shit is conductive, right?_

Thought, to go with memory. His? It’s distant, most of his focus held steady on the wall of white fabric in front of him and the movement of his body. Sharp little quarter turns, hands pressed together, eyes forward, hips and thighs held tight, the flow of power as steady as they can make it but not steady enough; he can feel the spell coming apart around them, crackling to pieces.

He can make out shadows through the wall of cloth: two women, or the shape of them. He can hear voices.

“It’s not important, just—look, Shoshanna. Can you just tell me where to find it? You’re a follower of Bacchus. A maenad. If anyone knows, it’s you. You ripped a guy apart there, once.”

_Jules_.

Thought. His? His. It’s not distant this time, it’s the only thing in the world. It’s water in his throat and on his lips, a hand at the back of his head, cold tile against his knees, the scene in front of him fading out for the briefest of seconds in a tide of affection and sorrow and history.

The world snaps back into place. No time has passed. Quarter turn left, elbows out, ignore the spray of sparks from above and the faint smell of burning hair. He feels calm, in control. He usually does in the middle of a potential fire. “Not a lot of time left.” His voice (not his?), soft and a little rough, like the pages of a book foxed around the edges, pitched to carry.

“Fine _, former goddess_ ,” says the second person within the tent, Not-Jules or Shoshanna or whatever, the air quotes both evident in her voice and visible in shadow play against the cloth, and he feels like he would roll his eyes if that wasn’t the kind of mid-spell gesture that might make things go sideways quick. He’d learned that the hard way.

_Hands, callused and smelling faintly of oyster sauce from their takeout dinner, smoothing over the place where his eyebrow used to be. The skin feels tight and hot, like a sunburn. “Well, chickadee, the good news is that it’ll grow back.” The hint of a laugh in his mother’s voice, even though she’s trying to make her face look appropriately sympathetic. She’s not doing a good job of it; the corners of her mouth keep twitching._

Memory. Not his. His mother doesn’t smile like that (he can’t remember what she smiles like, or if she does, or her face). He hadn’t learned any magic from her. He’d learned it—he can’t remember where he’d learned it.

“I can’t tell you where the entrance is, but I know who can,” Not-Jules says, and she sounds almost bored now, like she walks into a Tesla Flexion every other day. “I mean, I’m an _Atlantic City_ maenad. I don’t go back that far, and Bacchus hasn’t thrown that kind of rager in literal eons. You need a _Thracian_ maenad. Not a lot of them around these days. All that partying, it catches up with you after a few thousand years, you know? The last one retired down in Miami about a decade back. Theope. She’s probably still there.”

“Retirement community?”

A faint snort, soft enough that he can barely hear it through the walls of the tent. “Please. Night clubs. Just because she can’t keep up with Bacchus anymore doesn’t mean she’s not still down for a good party.”

“Got it.” A pause. His hands are starting to sweat; impatience claws at his throat. It doesn’t feel like his, not really. “And—thank you. And I’m sorry.”

“For what? Wasting some of my night? It’s okay.” From her tone, Not-Jules thinks she’s being gracious by allowing that much. “I gotta skedaddle, though. They were just bringing out the Jell-o shots, and if I’m not back soon Tiffany will have taken all the red ones. I’m not libating to the glory of our god with _green_.”

“Sure.”

He blinks, and there’s only one shadow left in the tent. The room is darker now, and quieter, the electricity and the magic that fuelled it all burned out. He lets his hands fall to his sides and scrubs the sweat that has gathered between them off against his jeans. Carefully, he does not look at the mess they’ve made of his apartment as he steps around the edge of the white tent, making a beeline for his abandoned chair and the beer sitting on the table beside it. It’s gone room temperature while they were working, but bits of condensation still cling to the glass, turning his newly dried fingers wet again. He drinks it anyway.

The walls of the tent slide to the floor. Julia stands at the center. She looks tired, but she usually does, these days. Obsession born of grief can do that to a girl.

With the cloth of the tent in a pool on the ground, he can see Penny on the far side. He doesn’t look tired, and he doesn’t look away from Julia.

(Penny doesn’t look away and Julia doesn’t look, he can’t help but note. It’s been weird. They’ve been weird. He’s sure he should feel something about that, but mostly he just feels like he wishes they would stop, because he spends most of his time with them these days and it’s making shit awkward.)

The silence doesn’t last for long before Penny breaks it. “Miami, then. I guess.” He doesn’t sound enthusiastic. He’s barely even pretending to do this for any reason other than that it matters to Jules, because he doesn’t know any of the rest of them well enough for them to matter. He takes another pull on his beer and wonders why he’s the only one who ever seems to remember that.

“Miami,” Julia echoes, soft, and something in his stomach twists, the carbonation of the beer sitting wrong and acidic in his gut and on the back of his tongue.

His lips tingle, like some of the electricity of the spell still lingers in the air.

He doesn’t say anything.

Tile beneath his knees, cold and wet.

He doesn’t talk to Alice these days. None of them do. Or maybe Alice doesn’t talk to them; hard to tell. He doesn’t think she’s avoiding them, but she’s _busy_.

Busy fixing the Library. Or _remaking_ it. He doesn’t really know. He kind of doesn’t care, although he also kind of wonders why she bothers.

(He doesn’t wonder at all. He could’ve watched the Library burn, but it’s the kind of place – the idea of a place, at least – that will always give a girl like Alice a bit of a nerd boner. He can understand that, so he tries not to let it scratch at him too much, under the skin, in the places that whisper _remember what they did, remember what they’ve done_. He’d thought the same about Marina. He’d thought the same about Reynard. No one had listened then, either.)

He doesn’t talk to Alice these days, but they need the ritual, and for that they need the book. No one is better situated than Alice to get them a _book_.

He passes word to Harriet, and Harriet passes word to Zelda. He sort of expects to get a polite _fuck off_ , all things considered and in spite of all of the things that should have led to _yes_. Instead, he gets a place and a time. When he sees it, he almost laughs.

Brakebills.

They can come and go as they please, now. It’s not like anyone is going to stop them. Alice is the Head Librarian and he—

(He stops, the thought of _self_ skittering and uncertain along the edges of his mind.)

She’s much as he remembers her, pale hair like a veil and slanted fox’s eyes, dressed like a school teacher in her high lace collar, mouth wilting into a disapproving line.

(Something in his chest tightens, releases, maybe bleeds a little, and it doesn’t feel like it belongs to him. Or it does. Maybe it does belong to him, but it doesn’t belong here, in this moment.)

She holds out the book, a thin volume with a green cloth cover, but pulls it back before his fingers can close around the spine. “I know what you’re doing,” she says. The tone of her voice matches the line of her mouth. It’s dark here, night dense and black on the steps of the school that at least one of them had once called home, but not dark enough for him to miss it: she doesn’t want to be here, and she doesn’t think he should be here, either.

She still came, and he thinks that says more than her disapproval ever could.

“No shit,” he says, and reaches for the book again, pulling it from her fingers with perhaps a bit more force than is strictly necessary. Alice grips the edge of the cover for a moment but offers no real resistance.

Alice rubs her fingertips against her skirt. “Have you ever thought,” she says, and then stops.

“Once or twice,” he says, mouth twisting into something not altogether kind. He receives another withering look for his trouble.

“Have you ever thought that maybe you’re not doing him a favor?”

“Not him that I’m interested in doing favors for,” he says with a shrug. He brushes away the whisper of doubt that crowds at the back of his tongue after saying the words, the memory of putting another book on the closest thing they were going to have to a funeral pyre. He isn’t going to complicate this by caring what’s wanted by some dead boy he’d shared space and a few world-saving quests with but not much else; Julia wants him back. He’s always done best when he can divide things into the people he cares about and the people who can fend for themselves, with a nice line between the two. It’s why he’s spent the last few months dodging Pete’s calls.

Nothing good ever came from trying to save _everyone_. Look at Penny. Shit, look at Quentin.

(For a moment, the world shifts, doubles, quadruples, like looking into two mirrors set across from each other, before his vision snaps back into place.)

“It’s selfish,” Alice says simply. “It was selfish when he did it, too.”

“Why’d you come out,” he asks, “if you’re so sure we shouldn't be doing this?”

Alice shrugs, and in the half second before she looks away her eyes are too bright in the dark, too bright for him not to notice. “I never said I _wasn’t_ selfish,” she says, and then, softer still. “I miss him.”

“I don’t,” he says, before turning away, boots cutting across the wide stretch of green in front of Brakebills. He knows he means it, because he also knows why Alice’s whisper of _I miss him_ sits hard and jagged at the back of his throat, and it isn’t for the sake of Quentin Coldwater.

The water is cold when it hits the back of his tongue, and he swallows because he can’t quite summon the will to choke.

Miami is muggy and hot. He hates it. Penny doesn’t, and he’s reminded that this is, if not close to home, then closer to home than New York ever was. He remembers the way that Penny – _his_ Penny – had always stolen the blankets off the room’s second bed when he was spending the night, back when they’d been at Brakebills. The girl he had roomed with had hated him. He hadn’t much cared. It used to be a good memory. It’s not anymore.

It’s not as difficult to find the maenad as he would have thought.

She looks about eighty. She also looks _good_. There’s a gold headband shaped like a snake across her forehead, and she’s dressed in a very tight leopard print dress. The color on her lips is a deep wine red.

“Sure, honey,” she says in a low smoker’s rasp, voice somehow carrying over the deep throb of the bass and eyes fixed on Penny. “Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

Those wine red lips have a lascivious twist, and he looks at Julia, briefly willing to forget their history to share a joke at Julia’s maybe-boyfriend’s expense. Julia’s not looking at him, or Penny, or the Maenad. She’s looking at the dance floor.

There hasn’t been much of a chance for fun recently. He throws out an elbow, catching Julia in the arm a little rougher that he means to. “Go on,” he says. “We’ve got this.”

Julia hesitates. He expects her to say no; most of the reason they haven’t had much chance for fun is because she’s on a mission, and he’s never met anyone less capable of taking their teeth out of a bone in his goddamn life. It’s not him, but it is one of the things he likes about her.

“You got this?” Julia asks Penny.

“Sure.” Penny looks uncomfortable with the way their geriatric maenad is rubbing his arm, but he also looks determined. It’s not an unfamiliar expression, and the way that his heart twists in his chest in response is pain but almost pleasant. He nearly doesn’t notice when Julia’s fingers close around his wrist, cool and dry in the heavy air of the nightclub.

He lets himself be pulled onto the dance floor. He lets himself get lost in the music, until his shirt sticks to his spine with sweat and the soles of his feet thrum in time to the music. When he sees some guy trying to crowd into Julia’s space, he dances closer, close enough that when Julia turns her head and laughs, brighter than he’s heard in months, he can feel the brush of her hair across his cheek. When he curls a hand around Julia’s hip and pulls her even closer, Julia lets him.

The DJ’s voice announcing last call startles him, and he realizes they’ve been dancing for hours. “Sorry, girls,” the maenad says, although she doesn’t much look it, mouth still curved in that smile. He steps tenderly, pretty sure there are blisters hiding inside of his boots now. “Sometimes being around me has that effect on people.”

Penny doesn’t say anything at all.

His hand is braced against something as cold and as hard as the tiles beneath his knees. He scrambles to find purchase, tries to push back against the hands holding him in place, but his fingers slip and the surface beneath his hand goes from slick and cold to jagged enough to cut. He jerks away reflexively when he feels it scrape against his palm, and is pushed under once more.

“Hey, so you’re totally coming to the potluck on Sunday, right?”

He doesn’t slow his pace as he hits the bottom of the stairs. He hasn’t attended a building potluck in months, not since he realized that attendance is recommended but not actually either mandatory or _enforced_. “I’m busy, Bailey.”

He hears a deep, gasping inhale from behind him and stops. It’s harder to blow off one of his landladies than the other.

“You will come, she-pig. You will bring chips. You will,” a pause, “ _schmooze_.”

“Christ,” he mutters, before raising his voice, “I’m kind of in the middle of something. Can I catch the next one?”

He resolutely does not flinch at the low growl that is his only immediate answer.

“You seek something,” the Baba Yaga says eventually. “You seek the lyre.”

He doesn’t want to ask, but—. “You got a bead on it?”

“No. But when you are done with it, you will give it to me.” The Baba Yaga breathes deep. “Three months rent.”

It’s more than a single item has ever been worth to his more terrifying landlady. “Deal.”

“ _And you will come to the next potluck.”_

He’s out the door almost before he hears Bailey’s sing-song and absolutely insincere, “Sorry!”

The Black Market has moved twice since his last visit, but recently he’s made more of an effort to keep track. Always useful, knowing where to go to get the things that can’t be gotten anywhere else. Always necessary, knowing where to go to hear the things can’t be heard anywhere else. Currently it’s open air, tucked into a corner of Gramercy Park, more like what he remembers from his few visits during childhood than the bleak warehouse Pete had shown him. Spells peel away an entrance through the tall fence and encourage passerby not to look at this strange and impromptu flea market where no other flea market has ever dared to be.

“Pete’s still looking for you,” Eunice says as he passes her booth.

“Too bad I’m not looking for Pete.”

“Mmm. Kraken tentacle, my dear? You’re looking peaky.”

He shakes his head. “Thanks, but no. Where’s Charles set up?”

He follows the directions Eunice gives him. Charles is half-dozing in a folding chair behind his booth, long limbs spread out in every direction. He’s a new face to the Black Market but an old one to him: Charles and Hannah had a thing for a few months the year he was ten, which had mostly meant that sometimes he had woken up in the morning to find Charles already puttering around the apartment. He hadn’t minded. Charles had never had much to say to him, but he’d been much more into breakfast food than Hannah ever was, and seeing him again tastes like omelets and pancakes cobbled together from Hannah’s limited pantry, sounds like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters played low on the battered stereo in the kitchen in the hour before his mother had crawled out of bed, smells like cheap drugstore roses from the night before and butter melting in the pan.

There’s a violin set at the center of the table, encased in glass. “Wouldn’t touch that if I were you,” Charles says, voice rusty with sleep and eyes still closed. “You’ll start playing and the rest of us won’t stop dancing. Not a good time for anyone.”

He shifts his focus to a small brass jaw harp at the edge of the table. “And this one?”

“Lets you talk to birds.”

“Cool.”

He grins, brief and flashing. “I got your message, and I’ve got good news.”

His breath catches briefly in his throat, but his voice is calm. “You have it?”

“No,” he says, but before disappointment can settle he’s holding out a scrap of paper, caught between his index and middle fingers. “I know where you can find it, though.”

His sinuses burn as he breathes water in instead of swallowing it. It’s his fault. He’s trashing too much, because he doesn’t want to drink. If the water touches his tongue again, then he’ll—.

“Remember.”

“—and remember, this was _Todd_ ,” Margo says, shoving her hair over her shoulder. “Fucking _Todd_. Can you believe it?” She flicks her fingers through the air. Her nails are improbably perfectly manicured, even after weeks spent in Fillory (or years; he’s never been sure of how time there is supposed to work, but it can’t have been too long – Eliot still moves gingerly, the tilt of his mouth wry every time it takes him longer than it should to cross a room or stand from a chair).

“I think you mean _Dark King Elliot,_ Bambi,” Eliot says.

“I really don’t.”

“He _actually_ hated us.”

“I’m not sure why. We’re fabulous.”

It occurs to him that they’re trying too hard, Eliot’s hand pressed against the table midway between them like that will be enough to bridge sorrow and separation, Margo’s gaze steady and determined on his face, like she’ll accept nothing else, like she can _will_ them into being normal by pretending at it. None of it flows quite natural, but he can tell that they’re trying, and he thinks that sometimes the trying is enough. The thought seems—it doesn’t feel like one he’s having in the moment, like a part of him is watching them strain themselves to meet each other and it’s making his chest ache, while another part of him barely registers the half second lag between Eliot speaking and Margo summoning a response and cares even less than that.

Which means—.

He has no idea what it means.

“So,” Margo says, finally breaking eye contact with Eliot to contemplate her manicure, the pad of her thumb rubbing thoughtfully over the dangerously pointed tip of the nail on her middle finger and her voice deliberately casual, “I can’t help but notice that we’re not the only ones who have been busy. Are you going to tell us what _you’ve_ been up to?”

There are books and papers spread on every available surface, and neither of them are shitty magicians; they’ve probably seen enough during Margo’s leisurely retelling of The Defeat of Todd the Great and Powerful to put it together for themselves, if they want to.

Julia doesn’t even try to lie. “We’re going after Quentin,” she says. “We’re getting him back.”

Part of him is more interested in finishing a glass of the really _nice_ Fillorian champagne that Eliot has brought back with him to notice the way that the champagne benefactor himself breathes in sharp and then goes still and silent in his chair; part of him cannot look away, even if he’s only seeing it out of the corner of his eye, the center of his vision filled with golden liquid and gently rising bubbles, that small slice of sight and space and passing seconds taking up much more of his focus than it seems to have at the time.

(Something in his chest tightens, releases, maybe bleeds a little, and it _belongs to him_ , but it doesn’t belong here, in this moment.)

There’s a rushing sound in his ears, one that also doesn’t belong in this moment, and he barely hears when Margo says, “How can we help?”

“ _Can_ you help?” Julia asks. Her voice sounds distant, even though he’s vaguely aware that the him-of-this-moment is paying much closer attention to Julia than he had to Eliot and Margo. “What about Fillory?”

“Josh and Fen have it buttoned down for now, and—ah, there might have been some confusion about the difference between _Dark King Elliot_ and _High King Eliot_ —.”

“Which is why I told him to change his name in the first place. We really should’ve seen this coming when he started dressing like me. I can’t believe I got Single White Femaled by _Todd_.”

“—and we’re going to need to work a few things out before my incredibly fine ass is back on the throne where it belongs.” Margo spreads her hands wide, and it strikes him as strange that he can barely see her through the way his ears are ringing. “We’re at your disposal.”

“This isn’t me,” he manages to gasp, when he pulls his head from beneath the cold soak of the water for a moment. “These aren’t mine.”

“No _shit_ ,” Kady growls in his ear, before pushing his head under again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry not sorry Todd


	2. Chapter 2

Kady. _Kady_. This is Kady, and he is—.

He doesn’t know.

“I’ve got it. We go, we steal the pretty harp from whatever’s guarding it, Penny plays fetch-the-magicians and we come back. It’s not exactly complicated.” There’s an edge of malice to Margo’s voice, and Kady can’t tell if it’s because Margo is talking to Julia or just because Margo is _talking_ and she always kind of sounds like that.

She’s been hiding out in the kitchen with Eliot for the last half hour to avoid being dragged into that particular cat fight, although Marina’s open plan living space makes it impossible to avoid entirely. “We could sell tickets.”

“We could also _die_ ,” Eliot says, and he smiles like he relishes the possibility but he doesn’t really seem like he’s paying much attention, not in the least because he’s been staring into the refrigerator for ten of the thirty minutes they’ve been in here and she’s pretty sure she’s going to have to toss her leftover chicken cacciatore before he’s done.

“You okay?” she asks, and tells herself she doesn’t care about the answer, or the way the skin under his eyes is creased and shadowed.

“No,” he says, and that frank syllable is more shocking than anything Margo had said about their adventures in Fillory. He finally closes door to the ‘fridge and looks at her, eyes dark and wide and too much like a monster’s. “I can’t be the one to do this. You know that, right?”

She thinks she understands why he’s asking, can read it in Quentin’s single-minded pursuit of returning Eliot to his former so-called glory, but she shrugs and pretends that the point has missed her. “It’s not like we thought that you were coming back. No one was banking on you, Eliot.”

“Who were you going to send?” he asks. “Or who was _Julia_ going send?”

Julia was probably planning to send Julia. Kady’s been composing arguments against it for months, although mostly those arguments are just direct eye contact and “fucking just _don’t_?”

“I’m just saying,” Eliot says, “that I can’t sub in. I—.” His mouth turns up into something mocking, and she doesn’t think it’s meant for her. “I’m not as spry as I used to be, let’s say. And—we all know how this story goes, right? Boy loses boy. Boy finds boy. Boy lacks the impulse control to get all the way out of the Underworld without checking his six o’clock. Resisting temptation hasn’t ever really been my strong point.”

They’re both silent for a moment. Eliot’s smile stretches half an inch, but he doesn’t look like he means it, looks like he feels a little sorry for making that face in the first place but can’t quite stop.

“I don’t think I could be—okay with it, if I was the one to fuck this up,” he says abruptly, not making eye contact, like if he forces the words out fast enough they’ll both be able to pretend that he hasn’t shown something like genuine human emotion. Kady says nothing, and he clears his throat. “Besides,” he says, and he reaches out, slowly, cautiously, like he thinks it might cost him a pound of flesh lost between her teeth, until he can rest his pointer finger against the base of her throat, “we all know you’ve got the pipes.”

_Absolutely not_ , Kady thinks, but his eyes are wide and dark and too sad to be too much like a monster’s, and instead her mouth forms, “Fine.”

He has the stones to look surprised. “Fine?”

The book with its worn green binding is very specific about what’s required to coax one’s way into the Underworld. _Oh, but what kind of voice can stir the heart of a god_? If Kady is honest, she doesn’t really like anyone else’s chances. Four fucking octaves of heartbreak and not much left to lose, other than her once-best bitch forever and a weasel-faced hedge witch who won’t stop calling her. She hopes that the Underworld has crappy cell phone reception. “Fine.”

“Kady—.”

“Shut up.”

He does. For a while. She knows none of them, she thinks, except maybe Julia and the strange carbon copy of a boy she’d once loved, but she still knows that Eliot isn’t exactly good at silence. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a peach, offering it to her.

She’s not sure what kind of even trade a piece of fruit is supposed to be.

(She remembers the warm sugar-sweet smell of a peach on a pyre.)

“I haven’t eaten anything but peaches for months,” he says, and he sounds so _tired_. “Mind you, that’s mostly because we set up this little resistance group in an orchard I—I knew of, and there wasn’t much other than peaches and plums _to_ eat, but—.”

She’s not sure why she takes it from him, but she does. She shoves it into the pocket of her own jacket, next to her phone. Her phone pings with an incoming text. She ignores it. “You’d better get going.”

“Places to be. Mythical items to steal.”

“Yeah.”

The living room has gone quiet. She knows that Eliot has also noticed, because he looks uneasy. “Do you think they’ve killed each other?”

“Would’ve been more screaming.”

“Mmm, Margo’s a biter.”

“You should talk,” Margo says as she swans around the edge of the counter. “We can _hear you_ , you know.” Which is fair; the counters are divider enough for Kady to pretend the rooms are separate if she doesn’t turn her head, but there are no actual walls. Margo glances between them, and Kady can see the question hovering on the tip of her tongue, but eventually she just shakes her head. “Come on. We’ve got some grave robbing to do.”

Eliot leaves. Kady doesn’t watch, and he doesn’t look back. She can hear Penny’s voice from near the door, and then the silence of their sudden absence. She stands in the kitchen for a few minutes before going to find Julia, shrugging out of her jacket and leaving it draped across the apartment’s massive sectional as she goes. The living room is empty, and the rest of the first floor of the apartment too. The gilded railing on the spiral staircase is cool beneath her hand, and she can’t quite help the thrill of possessive pleasure she feels every time she climbs it. None of the places she had lived growing up had been as large as her current closet, and it’s stupid and petty – it feels like a betrayal of Hannah’s memory, because she’d been a shit mom but she had tried to provide – to take so much pleasure in polished wood floors and high ceilings, but sometimes the feeling catches her unaware, a bubble of satisfaction pressing large in her chest and tight against her throat.

Julia is sprawled across the unmade bed, hips canted at a strange angle where the quilt has bunched up midway down the mattress. “I’ll get up in a minute,” she says, even though Kady hasn’t said anything. She doesn’t say anything, just flops down next to Julia and pretends that she doesn’t see the little smile that crosses Julia’s face as the mattress bounces and settles beneath them.

Kady turns her head and finds Julia already watching her, dark eyes shadowed beneath the tangle of her hair. Like Eliot, she looks tired. Unlike Eliot, she looks—something other than tired. “Get your boots off the bed,” she says, without much feeling.

“It’s my fucking bed,” Kady replies, before rolling onto her side and leaning forward.

It’s not the first time she’s considered kissing Julia. She’d imagined it, briefly, stretched out on Richard’s couch; the memory is no longer a fond one. She’d thought about it beneath the glaringly bright windows of Julia’s old apartment, a passing desire to press warmth and comfort against all of Julia’s sharp angles and fear, easily ignored. It’s never been anything _but_ a passing desire and easily ignored, and it’s barely more than that now, mouth soft and open, not doing much beyond than breathing against Julia’s unmoving lips.

It’s not really a kiss at all, not until Julia kisses her back.

They kiss slow and lazy, long nights of research and the weight of grief written in the way that Julia’s mouth moves under hers. She’s almost surprised when she feels fingers curl against the back of her head, pulling her down and in. She lets her eyes slide closed, and it’s always been simple for her to get lost in this, the wet slide of tongue and teeth and the sudden sharp sting of Julia biting at her lower lip. Julia’s hand in her hair guides her closer, until she’s propped up on elbows against mattress and hips against hips, and it seems like the easiest thing in the world to let her thigh slide between Julia’s legs, break the kiss and find the edge of Julia’s jaw, turn slow and lazy into slow and filthy.

She grinds down, scrapes teeth against the soft stretch of skin just behind Julia’s ear, and is rewarded in the way that Julia arches into her and pants out something that might be Kady’s name. Her hair smells like fake vanilla, the cheap shampoo that Kady has stocked Marina’s expensive marble shower with, and Kady moves lower, heat bleeding through the thigh of her jeans and Julia’s pulse against her tongue. She worries skin with teeth, thinks about leaving a mark, and—.

Julia’s phone rings.

For a moment, Kady imagines that Julia hasn’t gone suddenly still against her, but she’s never actually been much for pleasant fantasies when set against inconvenient reality, and she sighs as she lets her forehead fall forward to rest on Julia’s collarbone. She thinks about pointing out that Eliot and Margo just left, there’s no way they’ve cocked it up already, but eventually she just says, “You should get that,” and rolls back until she can feel her spine sink into the three inches of foam draped across the top of the mattress.

Her eyes are still closed, but she can hear Julia move, can feel the way that the bed shakes as she sits up. “Hey,” Julia says. The bed shudders again as she stands, then stills beneath Kady’s back. “You got to Dion okay?”

“Fuck,” Kady says. There’s no real heat behind it. She remains where she is for a time, but eventually she pushes herself up and flings her feet off the edge of the bed. Someone has to set up the Tesla Flexion before Penny returns; if Eliot and Margo manage to bring back the lyre, it’s still not going to do them any good if they can’t find an entrance to the Underworld.

Resurrecting the dead isn’t easy. There’s always more work to be done.

“Kady,” he says, the next time that he breaks for air.

“That’s something, I guess,” she says, and grunts when he pushes back against her. “Come on, Q. Stop fighting me on this.”

He’s—. He is?

He stops fighting, and lets his head be pushed back under the cold rush of water.

He _wants_ to know.

It’s always a shock, being somewhere and then—not even blinking, but being somewhere _else_. One moment: her apartment, bright open and huge and honestly a little minimalist-opulent for her tastes, but she took it and it’s _hers_ and really Marina had owed her a lot more than one impeccably decorated penthouse in a prime part of Manhattan, so she’ll keep it. The next: nothing but sky and craggy rock and barren dirt and low, choked, scrubby plants for as far as the eye can see, the kind of place that crowds the back of her throat if she looks at it for too long and fills her up until there’s nothing inside of her but the big sky and the dry grass, and there’s a certain relief in that, in not having any room in herself for herself, all the bullshit crowded out to the edges.

She slings the lyre over her shoulder. It’s lighter than she would have expected, tortoise shell and curved wood and gut string that should have long since rotted away, saturated with ancient magic so deep that if she locks her fingers into a frame and looks at it all she can see is a blaze of light, and yet still weighing almost nothing where it rests against the back of her jacket. “Thanks for the lift,” she says, perfunctory, before the she starts down the hill.

Loose rock and dirt crumble beneath her boots. “Sure,” Penny says from behind her. “I mean, no real skin off my nose, you know? I was getting kind of tired of listening to Margo bitch about us leaving her behind while we went clubbing in Miami, so—.”

There’s a hole in the earth in front of her, a fissure between two big grey rocks that looks barely big enough for her to scrape through. She’s in the right place.

“Kady.”

She hooks one of her legs over stone, the sharp edges of it scraping against her jeans.

“Kady, _wait_.”

Briefly, she considers ignoring him. She doesn’t. She shoves her hair over her shoulder and turns to look at him, one foot in the Underworld and the other in her own. Penny stands midway up the hill, hands by his sides, and he looks like Penny, like her Penny, but he doesn’t look at her like _her_ Penny ever had. He looks at her—he looks at her the way her Penny had always looked at Alice or Quentin, like he’s trying not to give a shit and mostly failing.

“What?”

He looks uncomfortable, but he looks determined. It’s as familiar as it had been in the middle of a club in Miami. “You’re planning on coming back, right?”

“Wasn’t planning on buying a summer home down there, Penny.”

“Not what I meant.”

She’d decided to live months ago. She’s kept deciding it in the months since. She shrugs. “I’ll be fine.” There’s no guarantee, of course. Neither of them are likely to forget that the last time someone went into the Underworld, it had been a one-way trip, whether she means to come back or not.

“Good.” He clears his throat. “Julia would be pissed if something happened to you.”

There’s too much weight to the way he says it, too much meaning, way too much deliberate eye contact. “Really? We’re doing this right now?”

He echoes her earlier shrug. “Her being happy is important to me.’

“Okay,” Kady says. She hasn’t really been thinking of how this conversation might go – mostly she’s been hoping not to have it, even if what they’re doing is more pointedly _not_ having it – but he’s less angry than she would have expected. Penny’s never exactly been one to Define The Relationship or whatever, but he cares. He cares more than anyone she’s ever met. Alternate timelines and different shithole worlds haven’t changed that. “You want to get to the point?”

“I want her happy,” Penny says. “Doesn’t mean I have to be the only one making her happy.”

Kady almost laughs at him. She doesn’t. “Your timing is _great_ ,” she says. “Can we talk about this when I get back? Or never. I’d also be okay with that.” She pretends that deflecting doesn’t feel like cowardice, like dodging Pete’s calls and letting Julia decide what path they’re taking because that’s turned out to be so much easier than drawing a map of her own.

She waits for him to argue, but after a moment he just shakes his head. “We’ll talk about it later,” he says. “ _When_ you get back.”

She thinks about not responding. She could just climb down into the Underworld and leave him standing on this hill. If she’s very lucky, maybe she’ll never find her way back out and she won’t have to talk to Penny about—about making her side chick status official, or whatever he thinks he’s suggesting.

“Don’t wait up,” she says instead. She slides down the other side of the rock. The lyre bounces against the stone, and she pulls it around to rest against her chest, even though she doubts that a little bit of rough handling is going to be enough to destroy some ancient magical artifact with enough oomph to bring back the dead and pay her rent for three months. It’s colder in the shadows of the cave. She can’t hear the wind outside anymore; she should still be able to see Penny, but the mouth of the cave is just a blur of blue-white brightness, just the big sky stretching now into forever.

Kady is a good battle magician. She’s used to shoving her feelings to the periphery, forcing her insides to settle until there’s nothing left but clarity. What she’s about to do is as much ritual as magic, and if she succeeds she’ll be pleading her case before a god. For weeks, she’s thought of very little else. It’s kept her from sleeping, left her so queasy that she’s ended up curled over the toilet at three in the morning, shaking and half hoping to throw up because then she could at least pretend it was the flu or some off fish rather than her own anxiety sending her to pieces, the same way they all pretend the bags under Julia’s eyes are just grief and long nights of research. She doesn’t think of the fear now. She doesn’t think about Penny, or Julia, or anything waiting for her back on the surface if she somehow manages to pull this off.

She’s never learned to play the guitar, and she definitely has no idea how to play the instrument in her hands. She plucks one of the strings experimentally. A note rings out loud and true, like pure golden sunlight turned sound, and suddenly the shadows of the cave don’t seem as deep and cold. It hangs in the air for longer than it should, and when she experimental hums out a few notes of her own the tone shifts and changes, tangling around her voice, echoing against the walls of the cave until it’s all the same sound, so sweet and so resonant that it awakens a distant ache in her own carefully hollowed out chest.

She stops singing when she tastes salt. The hand she swipes across her cheek comes away damp. After a moment, she starts walking. Down.

The book wasn’t particularly illuminating on what she’s supposed to sing, and her Ancient Greek is shit anyway. She starts with _A Ship Without a Sail_. She’d learned to play piano on a battered copy of The Great American Songbook, half the pages loose in their binding after years of being flipped through by the students Mrs. Dominguez took to supplement her pension. She figures if she’s down here long enough to work her way through all the standards she learned when she was twelve, she’ll have bigger things to worry about then her next show-stopping number.

She expects it to take a long time, but she’s only four songs and a second aimless strum at the lyre in when she emerges into a wide open space, the ceilings low but the gray slab walls so distant that she can barely make them out in the gloom. It’s brighter toward the center of the room, bright enough for her to see who’s waiting for her, and the final verse of _Stormy Weather_ sputters out between her lips.

“’Sup,” Penny says.


	3. Chapter 3

He remembers his name. _Quentin Coldwater_. He remembers the way Julia’s knees had knocked against his, crowded beneath a table almost too small to hold both of them—or maybe it’s not the table that’s the problem, maybe it’s that he’s getting too tall and she’s starting to fill out, the table as big as it ever was but no longer big enough to hold them.

_There will be trials and there will be tests_.

That’s what the book had said, although maybe not, because Penny had been skeptical about his translation. Penny 23, Kady corrects herself, because she hasn’t really made the distinction in months but it’s hard not to with the original model standing in front of her.

They look the same, but they don’t look at _her_ the same. She doesn’t feel the same when she looks at them.

“Kady?” He waves a hand in front of her face and she flinches back. “You still with me?” He’s smiling at her, like they can pretend that this is normal, like he’s not dead and she’s not lost, like she hasn’t carved off pieces of herself wanting him back, curled around her knees at night as though pressing close to her own body can make her forget that the other side of the bed is empty.

“Oh, fuck you,” she says, because it’s easier than saying _I love you, I miss you, you’re gone_. He’s wearing a suit, slick and gray. He looks like a librarian. He doesn’t look like _him._ For just an instant, it’s like looking at Penny 23: like this is a stranger, wearing the face of someone she loves, taunting her with what she won’t have again.

He stops smiling. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess that’s fair.”

She swallows. Her own spit feels jagged and painful going down. “What are you doing here, Penny?” She lifts a shoulder and then lets it fall, forces herself to be careless because that’s always been better than showing that she cares. It probably doesn’t matter. She’s not fooling anyone, least of all him.

“Someone’s got to guard the gate,” he says. He makes a little face when he says it. She’s not fooling him, but he’s also not fooling her: he knows _she_ knows how dumb that sounds. “Tradition, I guess.”

“So you—what? You’re here to stop me?”

He’s silent. It feels like he stays that way for a long time, although she’s pretty sure it’s just that she’s been so long with accidental radio silence than an intentional one seems like something meant to sting. “C’mon. You know me better than that. Someone had to guard the gate.” His smile is conspiratorial in a way that reminds her of late nights with his shoulders cozy between her thighs and at least half a dozen bad ideas they’d had between them. “I just made sure it was me.”

“You’re here to help.” It’s not a question. There’s only one question she wants to ask, and she’s telling herself she won’t ask it.

“I mean, you’ll have to do a little favor for me,” he says, and Kady feels tension slide through her shoulders. The book he holds out to her is too big for the pockets of his jacket and she doesn’t see him take it out, but maybe things work differently here. She doesn’t take it immediately, but there’s enough light for her to read the letters on the spine, gilded and glinting.

_Quentin Coldwater: Vol. 2_

“Take it back with you,” Penny says. “Saves me having to fill out the paperwork to get it shelved in the Library up top. Plus the Bookwyrm gets, uh, real cranky when we send anything back from this end. Can’t blame it.”

“Gross.”

“You don’t even know.”

She lets out the breath she’s been holding, forces her shoulders to relax. “So I get it right. Good to know.” She takes the book from his hand and moves to go around him, but he catches her elbow before she can.

“Hold on a minute.”

_Kady, wait_.

Her resolve crumbles. “If I asked you to come with me,” she says, “would you?”

There’s a terrible kind of sympathy in his face. It makes her want to snarl, scream, say _fuck you_ again so _I miss you_ won’t slip out. “Maybe,” he says. He nods to the book in her hand. “You don’t ask, though. You think about it, but then you think about how they’d all look if you brought me back instead of Quentin. Julia. Alice. Eliot. Shit, even alternate timeline me, although you think that’d be more some kind of where-do-I-belong existential crisis. Not ‘cause he doesn’t care about the little dork, but because you know he gets choosing one person over everyone and everything else, and screw the consequences.” She looks at him and he shrugs. “I’ve maybe—I read your book, too.”

“Weird,” Kady says, but she can feel the start of a reflexive smile on her mouth. “Creepy.”

“I mean,” he says, “to be fair, I didn’t think I was seeing you again. Any of you. Had to find some way to cope.”

“I miss you,” she says, and it almost feels like a relief to finally let herself say it.

His hand tightens briefly around her elbow. “Yeah. I know.”

“You left me.” She swallows hard. “But I guess we were always leaving each other.”

He makes a little noise, and she’s almost grateful for it, because she doesn’t—she’s glad, hideously glad, not to have to ask him if he misses her too, if this is hurting him too. “What was it you said? Life is accepting your own misery?”

“Did I? Shit. Profound. Put that on a Hot Topic t-shirt.”

The next noise Penny makes is ruder, less pained, and she’s glad about that, too. He leans forward until he can rest his forehead against hers. “You’re going to be fine without me, you know. You’re going to be great. In six months you’re going to punch Jared Leto in the teeth when Margo talks you into going to some Met Gala after party, and I’m just mad I won’t be there to see it.”

“You get that from my book?”

“I _get that_ from knowing you. Well, other than the last part. That, I got from your book.” He takes a step back. “You watching?”

“Watching—?” She doesn’t bother to finish her question. His hands are moving. She recognizes Popper 17 but not a lot else; maybe that works different down here too. There’s a brief flash of silvery light when he’s done, but it fizzles out quickly.

“Now you,” he says, when he’s done.

“What does it do?”

“He’s been down here a while. The dead, they—they let a lot go, before they move on, and they lose more after that. The librarians down here call it _drinking from the Lethe_ , but there’s not—it’s not a river. More of a metaphor, I guess. All of the baggage gets cleaned out so they can get on with the next thing, but everything else gets cleared out with it. You lead Quentin out of here, he’s gonna be a little _tabula rasa_ until you can bring him back to himself. This is how you do that.”

_If I asked you to come with me_ , she thinks, but this time it doesn’t feel right even thinking it. He’s not wrong. She isn’t going to ask. She mimics his movements until she gets it right, silver shimmering like liquid mercury at her fingertips until it fades away.

“You’ll need running water,” Penny says, “and memories to give him.”

“I don’t _have_ Quentin’s memories.”

“Didn’t say the memories had to be his,” he says, and he looks so smug about it that she almost laughs and she almost chokes, because that look on his face is a hundred late nights and half a dozen bad ideas between them. “You’ve got what you need. Just give the engine a kick and it’ll start running.”

“Professor Sunderland would be so pissed if she heard you say that.”

“Yeah, well, she can’t exactly flunk me now.”

“Lot of things she can’t do to you now,” Kady says with a smirk, because she’s pretty sure _everyone_ had known about that little crush, and really maybe she shouldn’t be surprised that Penny 23 is all speed ahead for some kind of thruple situation. He snorts out a laugh, and for just a moment, one single moment, it’s good again.

“You saying goodbye to me properly this time?” he asks, but he’s barely done asking it before her hand is fisted in the lapel of his stupid gray suit jacket, pulling him down and in, saying her goodbyes without having to speak the word.

He remembers—.

Standing in Penny’s bedroom at Brakebills, fighting with Alice. “ _Fillory and Further_ , book one, first edition. I worked all summer before eighth grade to get it. It's predictable—.”

He remembers Christopher Plover scrawling his name across the endpaper, his signature like a stain.

He remembers dropping the book into a fire, but no, this one isn’t his, it’s Kady’s, and—.

He remembers Julia’s mouth, Penny’s mouth, Alice’s mouth, famished and furious and still tasting of bacon—.

He remembers kissing Eliot and tasting sweet peaches and bitter plums.

Kady had burned his most cherished possession. He wonders what kind of curse has been broken this time, what kind of trade has been bargained for.

The massive double doors swing open, parting easily beneath her hands like they weigh nothing at all. The throne room is exactly what she would expect: a broad open space, black marble, gold and jewels, all the riches of the earth on display. There’s nothing here but a raised dais at the far end of the room and two thrones. One is empty, silver and iron and the glint of emeralds twisted together to form the impression of twining vines, but with unexpected homey touches: a deep burgundy throw blanket draped carelessly across one of the arms, a little side table with a pile of Mills & Boon novels, the spines cracked and creased, just like Hannah had read when she was feeling her most hungover and maudlin.

Sitting on the second throne is a man. His suit is impeccable. His eyes are red-rimmed, blank and staring when he turns and fixes them on Kady.

She lifts her fingers to the lyre and runs them across the strings. Golden sunlight turned music pours out. She thinks Bowie. She thinks a-ha. She remembers Penny’s first year bitching about his terrible roommate who couldn’t stop bleeding his thoughts and feelings all over the place, and smiles a little. “I stay out too late—.”

_“Stop.”_

Kady presses her hand against the strings, halting their song. “Not a Swift fan, huh?”

“Your timing is abhorrent,” Hades says. He sounds calm, but even from here she can see the rise and fall of his chest, too deep and too fast. He gestures to the empty throne beside him. “My queen was always the one swayed by mortal pleas. She’s gone. One too many of _your_ prayers answered. You’ll find nothing here. I’m very much not in the mood to be generous.” He looks at her a moment. “Go. I won’t stop you. Consider that your boon.”

She’s not afraid. Penny has already given her everything she needs. She knows that there’s nothing to be scared of here. She knows that she _wins_. “That’s not what I came for.”

“You can’t have what you came for,” Hades says. Kady lifts her hand from the lyre’s strings, and he breathes in sharp. “You won’t convince me by crooning out songs of lost love, girl. I know them now.”

Kady rests her fingers against the lyre, but she doesn’t play. She’s standing in front of a god and he’s furious with her, but fear isn’t what keeps her from playing, and she isn’t staying her hand just because she has the assurance of whatever it is that writes the Library’s books that she walks away from this not just intact but victorious. His eyes are red-rimmed and he’s breathing hard. His hand is clenched against the arm of his throne like that’s the only thing keeping him from spilling through the seams of his impeccable suit, and she—.

She knows what grief looks like.

The lyre gives a hollow, muffled clang as it hits the marble floor, before falling silent. The heels of her boots click out a rhythm as she crosses the throne room, until she stands directly in front of the dais. Hades watches her approach silently, mouth set in a line so hard and firm that his lips have gone pale and bloodless.

She drops to sit on the steps of the dais and rests her elbows on her knees. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Hades watching her, like he’s trying to puzzle out what she’s doing, or what she intends to do next. She doesn’t think he’s going to have much luck, since she has no goddamn idea what she’s doing, either.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she says. “It fucking sucks.”

Hades is silent. She gets the feeling he’s waiting for her to continue. When she doesn’t, he says, “That’s your wisdom? That’s the argument you would use to convince me to give you your friend back?”

Kady shrugs. “I could just grab that lyre and work my way through Rolling Stone’s top ten saddest songs of all time or, I don’t know, just play _Baby Shark_ on repeat until you’d give me just about anything just to get me gone.”

“You think that would work?”

“It’s like you’ve never heard _Baby Shark_.” She stops watching him at the edge of her vision and looks at her own hands instead. “I thought you might want to talk about what you’re going through with someone who gets it.”

“You would compare the two. She ruled by my side since before the world was born, and you think that you can relate because—because your boyfriend died, and you’re sad about it?”

“Fuck off,” Kady says to the King of the Underworld, but she says it in an almost friendly way, because this she understands too: lashing out because at least then the hurt isn’t only sitting there right there under her heart, an aching pit of _should have can’t never again won’t gone_ that can’t be filled. “I think I get it better than you do.” She thinks of Hannah, thinks of Bender and Silver bleeding out on the floor in front of her, thinks of the smell of Penny’s body burning, thinks of dropping Quentin’s stupid nerd book on another fire. “I think this is the first time you’ve felt anything like this, and you have no damn idea how to deal. Maybe you should consult an expert, you know?”

“And what would your _expert_ advice be?”

“Cowboy the fuck up.”

Hades laughs. It doesn’t sound like a laugh should. “Oh. And that’s what you’ve done?”

Her phone feels suddenly heavy with the weight of missed calls in her pocket. “No. But I’m just some petty human, right? You’re a god, right? Do better.” She breathes in, slow and steady. She reaches for the part of her that had believed, just for a moment, right before it had all turned to shit. “That’s what she would have done.”

“You didn’t know her.”

Penny had always been better than her at caring. He’d never been able to look at the end of the world and think that it was something he could run from and someone else’s problem. He’d never been able to draw the line between the people who were worth caring about and the people who weren’t, no matter what kind of front he put on. She still doesn’t really _get_ it, not the way he had. _Cowboy the fuck up_. “I know what it’s like to lose someone. You do too, now. Tell me: what wouldn’t _you_ do to have her back, if you had the chance?” She finally turns her head to look at him, and tries not to feel too stupid about figuratively throwing the gauntlet at a god. “You really going to say _no_ to me when that’s all I’m really asking for?”

Hades looks back at her. “Usually, it’s a lover who demands this of me. That’s not what he was to you.”

“No.” Kady breathes out, and finally admits a truth to herself. “Guess I love that fuckin’ nerd boy, though.” She lifts her chin and doesn’t look away. “Give him back.”

For a moment, Hades is quiet. “You have something for me,” he says.

She should be confused. She knows she should be, but she isn’t. Her pocket is heavy. It’s not her phone. She reaches into it, and her fingers brush against the soft fuzz of a peach.

It’s impossible, of course. She had thrown Eliot’s peach out weeks ago after rediscovering it bruised to a pulp and starting to rot into the lining of her jacket. She pulls the peach out and weighs it, finds it firm and glowing golden blush against the palm of her hand as if it’s fresh plucked from the tree. She offers it to Hades.

He hesitates before he takes it, but he does take it. He presses the fruit to his face a breathes deeply, and when he bites into the flesh she imagines she can smell the same soft sugar scent. She hears the skin of the peach break beneath his teeth, and she hears Hades, the King of the Underworld, the god of the dead, give a little sob, soft and strangled. The peach drops from his hand.

“She’s _gone_ ,” he says, and she can hear him choke on it and on the pulpy sweetness at the back of his throat. “She’s _gone_ , she’s _gone_ ,” and she understands this too, the repetitive drumbeat sorrow that refuses to resolve itself into any other words, the senseless wailing grief of a child denied something necessary to survival ( _should have can’t never again won’t gone gone gone gone_ ).

She’s never been as good at caring about the people she hasn’t already decided to care about as Penny was, but she’s also not a fucking monster. She reaches for Hades and drags him unresisting off of his throne, down to her level. She wraps an arm awkward and too hard around his shoulders, and she lets him break against her.

Hades barely twists his hand, but there’s suddenly a card between his fingers, white and gleaming. He looks worse than when she had found him. He looks lost, broken open, wrung out. Kady—well, she hopes it gets better. She’s been hoping that for a while, and not just for Hades’ sake.

“Take him,” Hades says, and she can’t tell if the emotion that colors his voice is gratitude or despair. “Take him and go.”

The train looks very much like a train from the inside. Kady’s a city girl, and she knows the dreamlike too-bright glow of the fluorescents, like the F at three in the morning on a Saturday. The wail of the tunnel passing by at speed doesn’t sound quite right, something living rather than something mechanical, more mourning than momentum. She’s alone, and then suddenly she isn’t. She can feel someone standing beside her, just close enough to not quite touch.

He doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t look.

Eventually the train stops, and the doors slide open. She walks out. She keeps walking.

Going up takes longer than going down. She left the lyre on the floor of the Underworld’s throne room, but she hums under her breath as she walks. She works her way through her earlier set list five times before she decides that if she hears another Rodgers and Hammerstein song she’ll lose her shit, and then she picks other tunes. She loses track of time. She loses track of a lot of things. She can’t hear anyone behind her, but she never even comes close to looking over her shoulder. She’s a good battle magician. She’s used to shoving her feelings to the periphery, forcing her insides to settle until there’s nothing left but clarity.

She steps out of the dark. The light is blinding, but after a moment it resolves into a picture that almost makes sense: dirty tile walls, a toilet that lists slightly to the left. A public restroom. She counts down the seconds and finishes the last verse of _I Don’t Believe in the Sun_ before she turns around.

Quentin stands behind her. He stands swaying, expression arranged into something bland and pleasant and completely devoid of life.

_Running water_ , Penny had said. _Memory_.

Her hands twist. Half of the sink is blasted away, and with it a chunk of the wall. The exposed pipes burst open. Within seconds the soles of her boots are wet up to the leather. The spell Penny had taught her in the Underworld is less familiar than the focused destruction she uses to open up the wall, but she makes her way through it, fingers cramping and sliding against each other beneath the cold rush of the water.

She’s only got her own memories to work with.

 _Cowboy the fuck up_.

The water gleams silver. She turns back to Quentin. His face is doll blank, pupils blown open dark and wide. Nobody home.

She takes his shoulder, and she’s less gentle than perhaps she should be when she shoves him to his knees in front of the sink. He doesn’t resist. “Drink.”

He doesn’t move. Kady slides a hand into his hair and pushes his face down toward water. Her breath shudders out of her, sharp and hurting and caught on the edge of disbelief. “C’mon, I didn’t go through all this for nothing,” she says.

“ _Drink_.”

Quentin sits on the curb outside the of a rest stop in Pennsylvania. The front of his shirt is soaked through and he’s shivering. He hears gravel crunch behind him and turns to watch Kady approach, her phone wedged between her cheek and her shoulder. She’s no less damp than he is but she doesn’t even seem to feel the chill. “Sure, no problem. Take your time,” she says. “We’ll just get murdered by cannibal backwoods truckers or some shit while we wait.” Her face is softer than her voice and he expects that it’s Jules on the other end of the line, so he’s surprised when she says, “I know. Whatever. Bye, Eliot.”

She drops to the ground next to him, heels scraping against the dirt. She offers him the bottle of water she’s holding, spat out of the vending machines studding the side of the rest stop. He gives her a dirty look. She rolls her eyes at him, and the familiarity sends a pleasant tingle down his spine. He’s seen that look before. The memory is his, _his_.

“They’ll be here soon,” she says. She twists the top off the water and takes a swig. “Work on looking happy to be back. I think Margo was crying.”

“She wasn’t.”

“She absolutely was not.”

Quentin smiles. When he looks at Kady out of the corner of his eye, he thinks she’s smiling too, although this far from the flickering lights of the rest stop it’s hard to tell.

“You went into the Underworld for me,” he says, because it sort of feels like something he should acknowledge.

“Don’t make it weird, Q.” She offers him the bottle of water again and this time he takes it. The plastic is cold with condensation against his fingers, and he shivers again. “We both know I just did it because I want to bone your bestie.”

“Right,” he says, because he still has her memories rattling around in his head, can still hear her saying _guess I love that fuckin’ nerd boy_ to Hades. He reaches out with the hand not holding the water bottle. She doesn’t relax under the arm he drapes across her shoulders, but she also doesn’t push him away, and it’s nice to feel someone else breathing next to him. She doesn’t say anything, and for a while neither does he.

“What happens next?” he asks.

“Fucked if I know,” she says, but it’s reflex, a habit. After a second she sighs. He might be imagining it, but he thinks that she leans into him a little. “I explain to my freaky landlady why I left three months rent in the Underworld. I talk to Penny. I talk to Julia. I start returning Pete’s calls. I get a life, I guess. You?”

The night is black and endless above him and beside him he can see Kady clenching her jaw against the cold. He’ll see Julia again soon. He’ll see Eliot. Penny will probably travel them here. He imagines he can smell peaches, and when he takes another sip from the water bottle it tastes cold like memory against his lips and the back of his throat. “A life,” he says. “Yeah. That sounds pretty good. “


End file.
